A remailer is a computer service which privatizes your email. High-quality remailers are in sharp contrast to the normal email account at the average Internet Service Provider [ISP] or what you might get from a normal hosting account when you create a website [source: The Blog Starter]. These accounts tend to be terribly un-private. In many cases, ISP could accurately stand for “Internet Surveillance Project”. Almost every ISP can monitor, store, and share your web wanderings and email with many “authorized persons” or “drinking buddies” without your knowledge. If caught, the ISP snoops have a built-in excuse: to wit, “We check mail at random as part of our ‘security’ system to protect our clients.” In many countries, ISPs are explicitly monitored by government agencies for ‘security’ reasons, for trade secrets, for diplomatic gossip, etc.

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

Data that can be read and understood without any special measures is called plaintext or cleartext. The method of disguising plaintext in such a way as to hide its substance is called encryption. Encrypting plaintext results in unreadable gibberish called ciphertext. You use encryption to ensure that information is hidden from anyone for whom it is not intended, even those who can see the encrypted data. The process of reverting ciphertext to its original plaintext is called decryption.

Pretty Good Privacy uses a variation of the public key system. In this system, each user has an encryption key that is publicly known and a private key that is known only to that user. You encrypt a message you send to someone else using their public key. When they receive it, they decrypt it using their private key. Since encrypting an entire message can be time-consuming, PGP uses a faster encryption algorithm to encrypt the message and then uses the public key to encrypt the shorter key that was used to encrypt the entire message. Both the encrypted message and the short key are sent to the receiver who first uses the receiver’s private key to decrypt the short key and then uses that key to decrypt the message.